Food

Today’s creation is a celebrity meal. As featured in his weekly column the creator of this recipe is none other than the master of misery, the baron of belligerence, the archdeacon of arsiness, Britain’s youngest ever curmudgeon, the one, the only Mr Charlie Brooker. To quote the article on the take over of Cadbury by evil Cheesemeisters Kraft,

Cadbury’s Full English Breakfast bar would contain the real thing: fried egg, bacon, chips and beans, mashed and compacted into a Crunchie-sized slab, covered with a layer of ketchup, then swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate. It’d look and weigh about the same as a Double Decker. And yes, it sounds disgusting – but you’d have to try it once, wouldn’t you?

Yes Charlie, you would have to try it once.

I’ve modified the recipe as I’ve never had chips for breakfast and I think beans would cause the resulting bar to be too sloppy. Fear not, my replacements are stalwarts of the breakfast plate, sausages and black pudding.

Firstly I pre-cooked the meat until it was nearly done. I figured I might as well make sure everything was cooked before I started deviating from human cookery too far.

Into the blender to mince everything into a nice carne concrete ready to mix with the egg to hopefully create our meat “biscuit.”

I then had to scoop that muck into my hands to form a large flat patty. I hoped I could cut the shape out once cooked. Uncooked meat can be a shape-shifting, fickle mistress once placed in the pan. You can have that tip free of charge.

I melted the chocolate whilst the meat cooked.

Once melted I poured a little of the chocolate onto a piece of clingfilm to form the base. I’d seen this done on a programme when they made nice chocolates. I wasn’t making nice chocolates but that was no reason to ignore handy hints. Yes that really is chocolate!

When the patty had cooked I cut out a chunk to the correct size and shape of a crunchy bar. As a control to find out exactly how lovely the addition of chocolate was I ate some of the meat mixture on it’s own.

Imagine the meatiest thing you can, maybe a nice steak, maybe a plate full of offal or maybe even sausages wrapped in bacon. Times that by about ten and that’s how meaty this mixture tasted. My chest hair visibly grew after eating it, that’s how meaty we are talking. It was tasty though.

I placed the slab ‘o’ meat onto the chocolate base, gave it a squirt of ketchup and poured the rest of the chocolate over the top.

I wonder what the camera decided to focus on in this picture because I can’t find anything?

I then wrapped the whole thing in the cling, shaped it and popped it into the fridge for a little while until it set.

What came out looked like a chocolate bar, albeit a bar that had been left on the dashboard of a transit van during a nice summers day.

Cutting into it revealed the full horror.

It looks like somebody is in the process of performing an autopsy on fat Jock McLardy the fattest man in the whole of Scotland who had just died after an evening spent trying to break the world haggis eating competition.

It tasted worse. For the first time in my culinary adventures I really struggled to force down one mouthful. Four hours later I can still feel that one bite lying in my stomach mocking me, I think it just called me a pussy. I can’t actually describe the taste in culinary terms. Imagine Boris Johnson taking an Oompa Loompa up the wrong ‘un whilst listening to Alan Titchmarsh sings Radiohead. Convert that to a taste and you’re nearly there.

Russian professor Evgeny Moskalev of Saint Petersburg Technological University has evolved a technique that allows turning alcohol into powder and packing it in pills. The new technique can solidify any kind of alcohol, including whisky, cognac, wine and beer.

“Dry” vodka can be wrapped in paper and carried around in a pocket or a bag. Vodka in form of a pill would come handy at parties when “consumers” would be able to calculate their exact required dosage.

Firstly is a shot of vodka really that cumbersome that it needs to be made smaller?

Secondly, exact dosage for what? One tablet for squiffy, two for slurring, three to start staggering, four to start loving strangers, five for temporary blindness. Why bother with the social aspect of drinking when you can just pop a few pills and get to the dribbling stage without all that “having fun” first.

Thirdly, does anyone else think that Evgeny might just be an alcoholic who is trying to find a way to get booze past Mrs. Moskalev?

I was eating in a sainburys cafe the other day when something on one of those triangular advertisement bits of cardboard caught my eye.

World’s first milk in a stick

Who was the person who sat down and thought, “you know what’s wrong with milk, it’s all a bit to bottley. Even when we thought we’d solved that issue we ended up with pointy cartons. I know they are good for finding homeless children and all that but they are a bit sharp and 80s comedians used to go on about how you couldn’t open them without milk exploding everywhere and then it went off. Even those little round things are just a bit too gay. What we want is the portability of those little bags of sugar but with all the opening pain of those ketchup sachets. Get this for a clincher, these portable little sticks, we won’t sell them, we’ll only have them in the cafe where their portability will be useless. Quick Brian, crank up the cardboard triangle machine, we need to shout this from the rooftops.”

I didn’t bother with the cinnamon, walnuts or pineapple because I knew the cinnamon and walnuts would remain in the kitchen for the next 5 years. We all know pineapple is far better in a delicious cheese and pineapple smoothie. I did buy carrots but not as many as the recipe suggested as I also bought the following root vegetables :-

Carrots – These were used as a control just in case I messed the recipe up.

Parsnips – Start with the easy one. Looks like an emo carrot anyway even if they taste different.

Sweet potato – I hope the sweetness would make a good cake ingredient.

Celeriac – I wasn’t even 100% sure if this was a root vegetable. It looked like one and wiki confirmed it was one. It also told me it can be known as the knob celery which made me giggle a little too much.

Beetroot – I like to imagine all soviet cakes contained beetroot.

I prepared the flour part and the egg part as listed in stage 1 on the good food recipe. I didn’t add the carrots as I was going to split the mixture into 5 equal parts.

I folded the two together and then processed all the vegetables separately to make then as small as possible. I wasn’t hand grating that lot! I did 40g of each vegetable.

I broke the folded mixture into 5 parts and mixed each vegetable into 1 part. As they were small I used a tray for making tarts instead of a big cake tin. Each veg mixture made two mini cakes.

I baked them for 30 minutes checking with a skewer to see when they were done. Meanwhile I made the icing as per the original recipe. When the cakes were done I left them to cool.

Once cooled I haphazardly added the icing and popped them into the fridge for an hour.

Just as they were ready to taste Mrs Fatuous and her friend returned from the restaurant. When they heard what I had done they wanted to try them. This scared me, I’m used to eating my own daft food ideas but these were innocent bystanders. I warned them but still they wanted to try them so we tried half a cake each.We’d all tried a different vegetable but we all liked the one we had tried so we chose different vegetables again.

We found out that all of them were nice and all of them tasted very similar. The sweet potato cake was judged to be slightly superior and the beetroot one was the most distinctive. I thought the celeriac cake left a slightly nasty aftertaste but nobody else did.

So there you go, if you fancy carrot cake but only have parsnips you have nothing to lose.

There was a man I used to know at work who was the embodiment of single-man’s logic. It was the perfect example of logical minimalism combined with deep, deep sadness. So he went through the minimal amount of effort and waste for his lunch at work this is what he used to do.

The night before he would take two slices of frozen bread from his sliced loaf in the freezer. He would spread jam on the frozen pieces, stick them together, wrap in cling-film and put them in the fridge. By the time he got to work the next day and it reached lunch time his bread had defrosted and he had a jam sandwich for his lunch.

It was both nerd genius and also a shining example of why men need women to save them from becoming lazy, pitiful creatures. However he is a god compared to anyone sad enough to need to buy this sandwich. This isn’t just sadness, this is Marks & Spencer dying a virgin sadness.

News of this website is slowly spreading to my family members. The reason they don’t know about the site isn’t shame it’s more that it’s very hard to explain to your family that occasionally you cook stupid stuff or write cheap, sweary rubbish. It just doesn’t come up in conversation too often. Mrs Fatuous let slip to my brother and aunt that I had a website then sat back to watch me try and explain. It could have been worse, I used to have a website thats name was very similar to a porn site and not a very nice porn site at that. Mrs Fatuous tried to show her parents my site once with obvious results.

My brother then spent a few minutes suggesting ideas most of which didn’t sound quite right but one suggestion was to do something with white pudding. First I suppose I’d better explain what white pudding is and to do that it also helps to explain black pudding.

Black and white pudding aren’t in fact puddings at all. Both are like sausages made of various bits of animal by-product. Black is popular in Britain and Ireland and is probably the dodgier of the two. It’s basically bits of meat, fat and oats mixed with blood that congeals where it is cooked. You buy it in the cooked state and is delicious as part of a fried breakfast. White pudding is mainly found in Ireland and is similar to the black pudding but without the blood. In it’s place is a higher pork content. It’s like a dense sausage and is served as part of a Irish breakfast which is very similar to an English breakfast but with soda bread in place of fried bread and white pudding with the black pudding. This Irish treat must have stuck in my brother’s head from a previous visit to the emerald isle.

What could I do with white pudding? I immediately decided it should include it’s black counterpart. When you think of black and white what do you think of? The crap Michael Jackson song? The Kim Kardashian leaked sex tape? I, of course, thought of classic Wonder and McCartney song “Ebony and Ivory” which is handier than the sex tape for what I was going to do next.

I decided to recreate the fizzogs of Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney in white and black puddings. This is despite not having sculpted anything since about 20 years ago when I made a face out of clay that exploded in the kiln wiping out nearby art when I was at school.

I had my source image, I had my puddings. I was ready to go.

Firstly I stripped the puddings of their outer garments. I repeat this is not that sex tape.

Originally I intended to do a serious sculpture. It only took 5 minutes to realise that the rough texture of the puddings and my complete lack of skill were going to make this impossible. I decided to settle for a simple cartoon style instead.

This made things a bit more manageable but congealed bit of animal isn’t going to replace clay any day soon. My trusty art scalpel hacked away until I had Paul’s head.

It's very hard to take a steady photo when you've got meat on your hands

Stevie’s afro proved a bit easier.

Much hacking later they were ready. Please note that the bit at the bottom of Stevie’s face is his little beard not some 1950’s casual racism. That would rather go against the ethos of the song.

Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony

I shoved the pair into the oven for 15 minutes. I would have fried them but they were a bit too thick and I didn’t fancy eating the raw pork bits. I made a nice red wine gravy to go with them which doesn’t really tie in with the song but it does taste nice.

Side by side on my plate, oh lord why dont we?

Stevie’s beard fell off during cooking and the bottom half of Paul’s head stuck to the baking tray but apart from that all went well and both were very tasty.

Hopefully I’ve done my bit to bring all races that bit closer together through the medium of meat. There was a moment when they sat on the plate when I realised that this sort of crap would have done well in this years Turner Prize. It would have but I ate it. If anyone wants to pay me a million pounds I’ll gladly do it again. Two million and I’ll recreate the Kim Kardashian sex tape in breakfast products.

They spent an hour and a half scoffing the 5,456-calorie feast. Days later regular customer Natalie got the fine in the post for breaking the restaurant car park’s 75-minute limit.

Breaking the seats more like. Regular customer I bet she’s very regular. Her turds come pre-greased.

Natalie — who eats at KFC three times a week — complained to restaurant bosses that she was unaware of signs warning of the time limit in Huddersfield, West Yorks.

She has failed to see the sign despite being there 3 times a week. Is her vision impaired by the rolls of fat that must be hanging off every inch of her body? Or is she effectively blind when the “chicken mist” descends.

“The 75-minute time limit is designed to accommodate our customers who generally eat for about 30 minutes.”

KFC isn’t fine dining. You don’t spend a pleasant evening with good company. You tend to throw grease down your neck quickly before going on to do something else. She had been chucking the Colonel’s greasy wares down her neck for over 75 minutes! I bet her arms where like something off a vet’s program just before they check on Daisy’s unborn calf.

The picture with the article shows a woman who looks exactly like you’d expect. I just couldn’t resist a bit of tampering.